The Bird Man of Brooklyn
By Amy Crawford Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Steve Baldwin spotted the first handful of bright green quaker parrots at the grassy margin of an Astroturf soccer field. Excitedly, he pointed them out to the dozen people who had signed up for what he calls a “wild parrot safari”.
“They’re doing what they love to do on a day like this — come down and forage,” Baldwin said, as the birders snapped pictures. “They like to eat grass, clover, weeds. When the sun hits them, they glow, like an emerald color.”
Suddenly something spooked the birds, and they took off, squawking loudly and swooping through the air, to land in a nearby oak tree and on the roof of an apartment building.
“Yeah, they like to roost in that tree,” said Baldwin. “It’s safe from predators.”
Focusing their zoom lenses on the building, the group shot more pictures. Mostly women, one with her husband and one with a little girl, the group had joined Baldwin, expert on and advocate for the wild parrots of Brooklyn, for a monthly tour of the borough’s major wild parrot colonies.
The quaker parrots of Brooklyn are an Argentinean species, myiopsitta monachus, also called monk parrots or monk parakeets. The New York population dates back to the 1960s, when Baldwin’s historical research makes him fairly certain that at least one crate of quaker parrots, imported as pets, somehow escaped at John F. Kennedy Airport. From there, they migrated west, to the Brooklyn College athletic field, where the light towers offered ideal sites to build their large communal nests. Since then, breakaway parrots started new colonies in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, and even as far away as Edgewater, N.J. and West Haven, Ct.
Baldwin, 51, is tall and fit, with wispy white hair emerging beneath a baseball cap. He is a natural public speaker, animated and engaging as he answers questions and explains the parrots’ behavior. He works in Midtown Manhattan during the week as a marketing manager at an Internet advertising company, but he said he reserves most of his free time for observing and documenting these small green birds. Baldwin has become an expert, consulted when neighbors find new nests and quoted about the birds in local newspapers.
“I’m kind of the only person,” he said, “who decided, you know what, this is so interesting, I’m going to spend every free moment I can out there, just trying to get to know them. Really, I think it’s very odd that in 40 years no one else came out and said ‘I’m going to become the bird man of Brooklyn.’”
Baldwin led his tour group to the other side of the iron fence that surrounded the playing field. About an hour before the tour began, Baldwin explained, he had scattered some Animal Planet-brand parrot food, mixed with millet, on the sidewalk under an oak tree. Now, mingling with a flock of city-colored pigeons, six bright green Argentinean quaker parrots ate busily. They waddled when they walked, cocking their heads.
“I can’t believe how close they are,” Baldwin said. “This worries me — I don’t want them to get too close to people.” In 2006, Baldwin said, poachers planning to sell birds to pet stores raided some nests in Brooklyn, prompting him to remove a map of parrot colonies from his Web site.
Again, something — perhaps a camera — spooked the parrots. Never mind, Baldwin said, he would show the group something really special — a new nest a few blocks away. But he cautioned the crowd not to reveal the location.
The secret nest was under construction in the crook of a large tree, with dangerous-looking spikes running up the trunk — a perfect safety feature for the parrots, Baldwin noted. He asked if anyone knew what kind of tree this was — it had been bothering him. The group shook their heads.
Standing in the street and staring up, the group saw two parrots in one of the nest’s openings. The nest, constructed from interwoven twigs, was already a few feet high and a few across, and the parrots were adding to it, grasping more sticks in their mouths. A tremendous squawking came from inside the structure. Baldwin explained that several pairs of parrots lived and were raising their young in one nest. Quaker parrots are the only species to build these stick nests; other parrots occupy holes in trees.
“They’re constantly constructing, renovating,” Baldwin said. “They live in apartment buildings, houses with multiple rooms — they’re kind of like a little New Yorker.”
How He Became a Devotee
Though he has lived in the New York area all of his life, and had been vaguely aware of the parrots for some time, Baldwin became a devotee just three years ago.
“I kind of got kicked out of my own nest in Yonkers,” said Baldwin. His daughter, now a freshman at Hunter College, stayed with her mother. Today she genially tolerates her father’s obsession. “She jokes with me, ‘Yeah, dad, he’s off in parrot land.’ But she’s come along on a couple of the tours and she reads the Web site,” Baldwin said.
After the divorce, Baldwin said, “My father died, and then the elections happened, so it was a triple whammy. And then I was pretty much unemployed. I was a freelancer at the time and struggling very badly at it. Discovering this other thing that was going on just made me really happy.”
Like many of his fans, Baldwin found the parrots on the Internet, when he was searching for information about wild birds in New York. He came across the Web site of Eleanor Miele, a professor of education at Brooklyn College. Miele had used the parrots as a case study to show student-teachers how to teach scientific fieldwork. Her Web site included pictures, observations and a map of parrot colonies, which Baldwin followed.
“I went out to Brooklyn and I expected to see a few of them, but I was very astounded by what I saw, it was a very striking thing to see these enormous nests,” Baldwin remembers. “I just said, ‘Oh my God, this is really interesting.’” The interest quickly grew into an obsession.
“If you put a human personality into a situation of extreme stress, they’ll start to hallucinate,” Baldwin said. “And my life was so stressed that maybe at the time I took a small thing that had always been there, and for me it became very significant. I said, well, this is so odd, so strange, so intriguing, so outlandish, that a bunch of South American parrots who had been pretty much deported from their own native land had just decided to survive here and kept going — I found that inspiring. If they can do it, maybe there’s a way for me.”